The open source Rails-based e-commerce platform, Spree, has just recently released version 1.0. After five years of platform development, this release contains 1500 new commits since the last one from 35 different contributors.

Mendicant University’s Gregory Brown recently released Newman, a micro-framework designed to help build email-oriented Ruby applications. It can automatically respond to incoming email, providing Tilt-based templates, filter email activities by attributes, and a lot more. It's NOT PRODUCTION STABLE, yet, but it could be worth a peek if you want to integrate an app with an inbox.

Gerhard Lazu just let us know about Deliver, a command line utility for doing a Heroku-like deployment on non-Heroku systems. It's built for *nix server environments and is fairly easy to configure. Deliver is an alternative to automated deployments using Capistrano.

Over on Unfolding Code, Marius Butuc wrote up a step-by-step guide on how to install Ruby 1.9.3 on OS X Lion using rvm. Apparently, the GCC installer is the way to go, but if you'd like more details, check out his post.

Stephen Ball put together a great article describing how to use blocks as function arguments, how to call any method in Ruby with a block, and how to hand blocks around using the ampersand and call. If blocks are confusing to you, see his post and become enlightened.

Mike Pack, just yesterday, wrote up a thorough introduction to Service Oriented Architectures in which he targeted, “the little guys.” He explains the costs and benefits of SOA, as well as walks you through an example of how you might split up an existing application to take advantage of it.

The Travis CI team is still alive and kicking, and looking to add even more features to the service (like private repo support, pull request testing, and more). If you'd like to help, they're looking for donations to help them spend more time on the project and continue to make it open and available to public projects. Even if you don't use Travis directly, you probably use an gem or other open source project that benefits from its continuous testing, so please consider giving them a small donation.